The Redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge

Opening Words
No.615
by Howard Thurman
from Singing the Living Tradition

"When the song of angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
      to find the lost,
      to heal the broken,
      to feed the hungry ,
      to release the prisoner ,
      to rebuild the nations,
      to bring peace among the brothers,
      to make music in the heart."

Hymn
No.231 "Angels We Have Heard on High"
Singing the Living Tradition

Responsive Reading
No.621 "Why Not a Star"
from Singing the Living Tradition

OR

from Charles Dickens (adapted)

We celebrate Christmas once again. God bless it! Let us by one consent open our shut-up hearts and think of people as if they were fellow-passengers to the grave.

Let Christmas be once more a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time. May we keep our Christmas humor to the last.

It is required of everyone that the spirit within us should walk abroad among our human neighbors and travel far and wide.

This is required by our joyful allegiance to the spirit of Jesus, A spirit sustained by the best in humanity ever since his day.

The common welfare is our business; charity, mercy, forbearance are all our business.

Let us go forth while it is day, and turn human misery into Joy.

Let us not be haunted at this season by the shadows of things that might have been.

If our past is darkened by ill-will, let not the mirrors of our own yesterdays show us what we shall be in years to come.

Human courses foreshadow certain ends to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends must change.

The year is waning fast, and it is precious time to us. We have the power to render others happy or unhappy.

We have the power to make their days light or burdensome, and their work a pleasure or a toil.

Our power lies in words or looks, in things so small that it is impossible to add and count them up.

The happiness we give is no small matter. A good word is worth a fortune. Let no idol displace Love, even a golden one.

Let us carry the torch of goodwill, that the light may banish hate.

Let us honor Christmas in our hearts, and keep it all the year .

A merry Christmas to everyone! A happy new year to all the world!

ALL: God Bless Us, EveryOne!

Sermon
The Redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge
excerpted from A Biblical Humanist Companion, by Dr. John H. Nichols

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has played a great role in determining what we expect from Christmas. Written in 1842, when Dickens was a struggling young author, this Christmas ghost story came to eclipse nearly every one of his works in popularity. The reformation of Ebenezer Scrooge strides over this season with almost as much authority as that of the birth of Jesus.

To understand the strange mixture of religious and secular themes that Christmas is, it is helpful to remember that the time or story of Jesus' birth was not important to his immediate disciples. Their records do not reflect that they celebrated Christmas. In fact, the first record of Christmas is the recognition that the early church in Rome took over a pagan holiday which celebrated the winter solstice and made it into the Christ mass. When the Protestant branch of Christianity formed itself, many Protestant sects rejected this Roman holiday. Thus, Christmas was not celebrated in the early days of New England because it was too associated with the Roman Church. Christmas was celebrated in the central and southern states of this country primarily as a time of feasting and gathering, but not for religious purposes.

In Dickens' England, Christmas was a time for parties. But he saw another dimension. Although brought up Anglican with a sophisticated indifference toward religion, by the age of 30 he felt he either had to accept or reject Christianity. In his short life he had seen too much suffering, too much cruelty, too many people rejecting the opportunity to extend warmth and companionship to be indifferent to the message of Jesus. He became a Unitarian because he saw in Unitarianism an attempt to tell and to live the real Christian message.

It was shortly after this that he wrote A Christmas Carol, the story of a Christmas conversion. There are no traditional Christian figures in it because Dickens did not believe in them. He did believe that we are all haunted by ghosts of our better and worse selves, and so he lets the ghosts tell the story of one's redemption to one's better self. The retelling of this story offers a hope to all of us that we could be redeemed to the goodness that perhaps lies latent in everyone.

His protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, who cares passionately for the bottom line and for little else, has no use for religion or sentimentality, as they do not cut a profit.

On Christmas Eve Scrooge is awakened by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, who is wrapped in yards and yards of chain to which locked strong-boxes are attached. Marley has been condemned to roam the face of the earth seeking in death the opportunities that he passed by in life, to lighten the load of his fellow men and women. He has come to give Scrooge one last opportunity to avoid the same fate. Marley urges Scrooge to go with the three ghosts that will visit him that night to see what they have to show him.

The ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge on a tour of his own growing up. He encounters himself as a lonely boy whose closest companions were the books he read. He remembers the yearning, long since buried, for the presence and warmth of real people in his life -- the wishes, long since buried, for the love and approval of his family. He sees the many people who reached out to him, desperately attempting to slow his long slide into self-absorption, people whose souls he could not touch because of his own preoccupation with personal security.

Shaken by these scenes, Scrooge has begun to feel things he had been content to suppress. Then the ghost of Christmas Present arrives to take him on a tour of the homes of his current acquaintances. He visits the home of Bob Cratchit, his clerk, where he experiences the warmth and stoic bravery of this large family as they make the best out of what they are able to afford on the wretched salary Scrooge pays. He experiences, too, their worry over the fate of Tiny Tim, their sick youngest child. The ghost helps Scrooge realize that even as hard-hearted as he is, people have not given up on him.

Then comes the ghost of Christmas Future -- the most frightening specter of all -- who has no face and does not speak. It merely points. Scrooge sees the Cratchit family, worn down in their struggle against poverty, living now without Tim, who has died for lack of proper medical attention. Then Scrooge visits the chamber of a man who has apparently died in his sleep, where the maid and cleaning lady are dividing up his things before the undertaker arrives. Two associates in the street are arguing over whether it would be seemly to have a funeral at all for this man, since no one would attend. "But who is this man?" Scrooge asks, and he is taken to an unattended grave where the specter points to a headstone which bears the name "Ebenezer Scrooge."

As Christmas morning dawns Scrooge realizes that he has been given a reprieve, another chance to live to his fullest humanity -- just as Dickens may have felt that humankind was given another chance with the birth of Jesus.

What was it that redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge ? We are led to believe that it was what Scrooge saw in the ghost visits that changed him. He saw the birth struggle and the dying struggle of love within himself. He saw the elemental efforts of other people to keep basic humanity alive within themselves. He saw that the bottom line for everyone is that nobody lives forever; the journey of life is brief, harder for some than for others, and hardest on those who try to make it alone .

By linking the importance of Jesus' birth and the beauty of that birth story with the message of love and kindness to all men and women, A Christmas Carol changed the celebration of Christmas forever .

And it came at a critically important time. The Industrial Revolution was sweeping Europe and would soon reach America. It was creating a new class of people who had the means of production in their hands and who lived for wealth. It was also creating a much larger underclass of people who would live their lives in poverty and never have any power over their own destinies. There was a new hardness, a new meanness that was making itself felt in society. And Ebenezer Scrooge exemplified what was frightening people about the drift of their relations one with another.

Many of us recognize the struggles of Ebenezer Scrooge in our own lives. Have we not been bruised in our growing up? Have we never shut down on the offer of friendship or kindness out of some fear that is buried deep?

Scrooge is a man who lives in a prison of his own devising, the doors shut and sealed with a bitterness of which he will not let go. His chains are forged with regrets that he cannot release and hurts he will not forgive. What the ghosts do is give Scrooge permission to release the locks of his own feelings, free now to feel both sadness and joy. And as Scrooge is released, so are we.

Christmas is the only celebration we have that is about a vulnerable child. A baby is born in a stable in a busy town, surrounded by Roman guards. The child is welcomed, and protected. Angels speak of their hope for the child. This celebration of the child speaks to the child in each one of us, whether that child be hurting or joyous, yearning for attention, or struggling for a voice. Dickens offers us the chance to use Christmas to love well the child in ourselves and in others.

Hymn
No.239 "Go Tell It on the Mountain"
Singing the Living Tradition

Closing Words
b y Sophia Lyon Fahs

And so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come --
Born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald the glory of their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show where to find
The babe who will save humanity.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.
Fathers and mothers --
Sitting beside their children's cribs --
Feel glory in the wondrous sight of a new life beginning.
They ask, "Where and how will this life end?
Or will it ever end? "
Each night a child is born is a holy night --
A time for singing-
A time for worshipping.
For heaven and earth are joined in the new creation.

Suggested Discussion Questions
by Sarah Clark

1. Dickens saw Unitarianism as "an attempt to tell and live the real Christian message". How did this message differ from the other Christian messages? Is there a "real Christian message in Unitarian Universalism in the United States and Canada today? If yes, how would you articulate it? If no, what message has supplanted it?
2. Share your reaction to A Christmas Carol. How do you think it "changed the celebration of Christmas forever"? What does it say to the contemporary world?

Last updated June 12, 2005